Typography and the City

I have been greatly enjoying our classes from Gary Gowans this semester, they are concentrating on typography, layout and grid structures. I have always loved typography, I love the power it provides to create endless styles, different tones of voice and creative expression just from your choice of font. It is an art form, but it is also extremely technical, there is a lot to learn about how to use typography to achieve the best results.

Although I learnt the basics back in College (I received the highest score in the year in the test!) it has been great to recap and refresh my memory. I have particularly enjoyed discovering the importance grids, they have always scared me a little and although I knew they were important I must admit I scarcely ever used them efficiently, if at all.

Our brief from Gary is to go out onto the streets and around town to take as many photos as we could of examples of environmental type, we are then to create a 5 page magazine spread, thinking about composition, white space, grids, choice of typography etc. The magazine is to be classy, think Baseline not a woman's weekly.

Here are a few examples of my photography, I concentrated on old and weather beaten shop fronts and examples of hand painted signage. I find this really interesting and quite beautiful especially as very few still exist. I wanted to keep all my photography black and white to keep with the old fashioned feel of the lettering.

Here is the first draft of my layout, I am aware things (like my widowed lines of text) still need to be tweaked. I chose two fonts from The League of Moveable Type , League Scrip #1 and Raleway, both are beautiful, thin and elegant. I picked League Scrip #1 as although it's a modern typeface, I feel it's vintage feel and handwritten elegance creates an interesting contrast between the thick and heavy style of the type in the photos. Raleway is much more legible for headings and subheadings yet still compliments the over all feel of the layout. The body copy is in Georgia.